Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Commuting

Rainy and windy in San Francisco this morning when I reached the bus stop at 18th & Guerrero in the Mission to start the work week a day late thanks to the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Holiday yesterday. The MUNI shelter did not in fact provide much shelter and the bus did not in fact arrive as scheduled, so I grabbed a cab and arrived only mildly soaked at the library where I work. As dawn revealed itself through the most westerly-facing of my office windows (partially visible below) and as the thunder and lightning and rain and wind continued, I commiserated in my mind with all the workers who had to be out there in it all day to get their jobs done, even though the worker who was supposed to be driving the early 33 Stanyan route evidently had decided this was a good day not to come to work. "Stalin," I thought enviously, "would never have put up with such an undutiful worker – it would have been the Gulag for that one." There is of course no hope that MUNI will substitute another driver for any of the many, many drivers who call in sick every day – the buses they are scheduled to drive simply do not run.

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."

– Borys Groys, Comrades of Time, 2009

"I study only what I like; I occupy my mind only with the ideas that interest me. They may or may not prove useful, either to me or to others. Time either will or it will not bring about the circumstances that will lead me to a profitable employment of my acquisitions. In any case I will have had the inestimable advantage of not having been at odds with myself, and of having obeyed the promptings of my own mind and character."

– from Products of the Perfected Civilization: selected writings of Chamfort, edited and translated by W.S. Merwin (1969)